unified field theory of writing advice

Recently, the Guardian published a two-part story in which a variety of successful writers responded to a survey about writing, in order to elicit advice for aspiring writers. This sort of day off for a journalist is not, of course, about being a better writer at all, or even a more successful one. At best it's a chance to join in while some of the writers you enjoy do what all writers love most, which is to goof around instead of writing. And at par, it's a measure of the ways in which privilege shapes the supersurface of the media narrative. Many of the answers are contradictory, and yet I believe I may have identified a single trait which could be easily condensed into one clearly very important piece of advice for aspiring writers:






That neglected piece of advice which applies in all but one of the cases, clearly, is this: BE WHITE.

The decrypted comment of the Guardian piece is not 'have enough willpower and whimsy to be a lovely sort of person at the page and it will fill up for you' as many readers are likely to have taken it. The message is aimed at white people who want other white people to buy their work so yet more white people can ask them asinine questions in order to help make more profits for white-owned corporations, and it is that writing's not a bad gig if you can get it.

Oscars 2010

"Italian film director Lina Wertmuller was the first woman to be nominated for Best Director (for Seven Beauties (1976, It.)). New Zealander Jane Campion was also nominated as Best Director for The Piano (1993), Sofia Coppola was nominated as Best Director for her Best Picture-nominated Lost in Translation (2003), as was Kathryn Bigelow for her Best Picture-nominated The Hurt Locker (2009). Sofia Coppola was the first American woman nominated for Best Director and only the third woman ever to be nominated for Best Director, while Bigelow was the second American woman nominated as Best Director and only the fourth woman nominated in the category."

Best Director - Facts & Trivia

There are five nominees in the category, which has run for eighty-three years, so four hundred and eleven times, a man has been nominated. The first time a woman was nominated was fifty years after the first ceremony, then another seventeen years, then ten, and finally six. A great deal has been made of Bigelow's nomination, and will be made of her win, and clearly there's a good reason for that.

But. Of the roughly 415 nominations, all but three have gone to whites. One Asian man, Ang Lee, won in 2005 for a film (Brokeback Mountain) featuring an all-white starring cast. Until tonight, when Lee Daniels was nominated for Precious, only one black director, John Singleton, had ever been nominated at all -- eighteen years ago, for Boyz in the Hood. Sixty-four years or so after the first ceremony. So by the Bigelow math, it'll be around 2025 before a black director wins in this category.

Spike Lee made his first movie a year after Bigelow made hers, except in the same amount of time, he has collected around 45 films in his resume, to Bigelow's fifteen. Some of Spike Lee's work includes She's Gotta Have It (a film which took in seven million dollars, or $6,825,000 more than it cost to make), Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Summer of Sam, the Katrina documentary When The Levees Broke, and recently, the critically mistreated Miracle at St. Anna, which I think was arguably one of the best films of 2008 if not the decade, and which even had Nazis and everything.

Some of Kathryn Bigelow's work includes a couple-three movies people vaguely remember as being sort of good, including Blue Steel and Near Dark, and also several episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets. Oh, and K9: The Widowmaker. I've never seen it, can't imagine why -- doesn't it sound great? I haven't seen The Hurt Locker either, and I can't say that Bigelow is incapable of making a film which fully succeeds on all levels, but I can say that if she managed it this time, it's a first.

I'm glad that she won. I'm glad that her win is being taken as symbolic of a victory for all women, because it is. I like her work -- like many people, I suspect, I've always liked it a little more than I should have, and that's a sign of a director who at least has approached the project with love, respect, and some kind of deeper contemplation about the cinema. But she is not a great filmmaker; at most, she's an interesting and competent filmmaker whose vision can seem more engaging than it otherwise would if we had any other female eyes available with which to look hard at gender roles and how they relate to cinematic violence. Hopefully, because of her hard work, dedication to steadily improving her craft despite the clear odds against her even being allowed near the real scripts, and ability to encode even the simplest film with interesting subtexts about the whole man/woman deal, before another eighty years go by, another woman will find herself on that stage, desperately clutching at two heavy gold statuettes as Alec Baldwin compromises in the name of equality and just pats her on the hip instead of slapping her on the ass.

Spike Lee, a man who is openly black, has never been nominated for Best Director or Best Picture. He's never been nominated for anything except Best Feature Documentary for 4 Little Girls, thirteen years ago, which he did not win, and Best Original Screenplay, which he did, twenty-one years ago for Do the Right Thing. This is a film which, like several of his others, will still be watched and studied when the last surviving prints of K9: The Widowmaker have turned to dust nobody bothers to sweep up. Many Hollywood people felt at the time that his omission from the Best Picture category that year was shameful, but none of them seem to have been inclined to make up for it in the decades since. And none of them, as far as I know, had a word to say against the film that did win in the Best Picture category in 1989, which was directed by a white Australian man, Bruce Beresford.

That film was Driving Miss Daisy.